Steven Brust wrote: > > > Well, sure. And then I stop disagreeing with them. Remember, I'm not > denying the existence of god; I'm denying that there is a god outside of > the realm of ideas. I'm denying a world in which the laws of nature do not > operate, or can be suspended. If you want to take some aspect or aspects > of the material world and label them "God" then I might wonder why you > bother, but I certainly won't dispute it. > It has been argued -- with a good deal of historical support -- that it was the Christian model of a God who was both creator and good which allowed the development of a view of the world as operating according to stable laws, which was a critical prerequisite for the development of experimental science. The Greeks (mainly) lacked an experimantal methodology because they didn't believe that the world _signified_ anything, and that it was therefore far more important to think about things apart from the material world. This isn't merely an issue in Plato, but also in Aristotle. Less developed sets of belief didn't tend to view tbe powers (whatever they were) as particularly benevolent, and therefore the effects of nature were seen as capricious -- they might be totally different tomorrow at a deity's whim. The philosophical schools of the middle ages, especially after the rejection of Averroism (the view that there were "two truths" which need not be in agreement, philosophical truth and revealed truth) supported the view that the world was ordered and predictable, and that God wouldn't change it (because he was good), and that matter and the world was _important_ (because of the doctrine of the incarnation). They thus provided the necessary context for attempts to investigate the physical world in a systematic, experimental manner. If the nature of the world as determined by experiment differed from what one thought it would be based on revelation, then the interpretation of revelation was wrong, and had to be adjusted accordingly. In that particular context, suspensions of the laws of nature -- miracles -- were seen precisely as _exceptions_, and very rare exceptions at that, which meant that they could be excluded from the areas which one was trying to investigate. Even if a miracle did occur, because it _wasn't_ related to cause and effect it would end up showing up as experimental error (so it wouldn't corrupt one's experimental findings too much). (This is why there's a methodological problem with Hume's argument regarding miracles: if they're already defined as grossly unlikely, then one can't use their unlikeliness as a way of deciding against them -- it's a _metabasis eis allo genos_.) -- James Burbidge jamesandmary.burbidge at sympatico.ca